Putting a face on world hunger: New
FAO report assesses food insecurity

To fight world hunger, policy-makers, the public and
the media need to know precisely who is hungry and why. This
is the information contained in FAO's latest publication,
"The State of Food Insecurity in the World 1999" (SOFI).
SOFI provides detailed data on the number of people facing
hunger by region and looks at a broad range of factors that
contribute to food insecurity.

The report offers some encouraging news. Since 1990/92,
the number of people going hungry in developing countries
has declined by 40 million. Malnourishment fell in 37
countries between 1990/92 and 1995/97.

But the number of hungry people in developing countries
remains unacceptably high, at 790 million. The findings in
SOFI make it clear that at the current rate of progress - 8
million fewer undernourished people each year - the World
Food Summit's goal of reducing the number of hungry people
in the world by half by the year 2015 will not be
reached.

"The State of Food Insecurity in the World 1999" also
presents the first data on hunger in industrialized regions.
According to SOFI, around 34 million undernourished people
are living in developed countries. More than three-quarters
of them are in the countries in transition in Eastern Europe
and the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

Yet some regions have made impressive progress over the
past two decades, demonstrating that hunger is not an
intractable problem. Despite declines in Afghanistan and
Iraq, most countries in the Near East and North Africa have
managed to attain very low levels of undernourishment,
accounting for 10 of the 14 developing countries where
undernourishment affects less than 5 percent of the
population. In Asia, only Mongolia and the Democratic
People's Republic of Korea have seen their rates of
malnourishment increase. Many Latin American countries are
also well on their way to food security. Although hunger has
become worse in some parts of sub-Saharan Africa, several
West African countries have made gains.